EDITORIAL NOTE
Many years ago, Jerry Pournelle wrote the novel Janissaries. I was a graduate student at the time, working in military and diplomatic history, and an avid science fiction reader, so Janissaries was right in my wheelhouse. I loved the original book and both of the sequels—Clan and Crown and Storms of Victory—and one of my deep regrets was that the series hadn’t been continued. One thing that I did not know at the time, and learned only recently from Phillip Pournelle, was that Jim Baen had been instrumental in creating the series by challenging Jerry to write a book explaining why aliens might be visiting Earth covertly, rather than announcing their presence. Knowing Jim the way that I did, I can just hear the conversation, and I found it very . . . satisfying to discover that he’d had a hand in creating a novel and a series I liked so much long before he and I had ever met.
Fast-forward twenty-one years, and I’m sitting in the Baen Books office in North Carolina reminiscing with Toni Weisskopf about my favorite, unfinished series, and Janissaries came up.
That was when I found out that Jerry had been working on the first new Janissaries book in twenty years when we lost him, that the manuscript was mostly completed, that he had left detailed notes about how he had intended to finish it, and that his son Phillip had undertaken to complete his dad’s final book. And, by the way, would I be interested in lending a hand?
The answer is the book you hold in your hands. Phil and I have tried very hard to maintain his father’s voice in what both of us regard as a labor of love. We aren’t Jerry. We are simply his son and a writer who loved his books, and we hope we have done right by him in completing the task he left unfinished.
—David Weber